Why I care about energy
A confession: I did not always care about energy.
When I joined the environmental movement, I was passionate about wilderness and national forests. When friends told me they were working on “energy,” my eyes glazed over. I imagined utility commission hearings about residential electricity rates and energy-efficiency standards… boring, I thought.
In 2005, I joined thousands of environmental leaders in San Francisco for a summit on the future of environmentalism, sponsored by the Sierra Club. There, it dawned on me that everything I cared about—forests, wildlife and biodiversity, the health of communities, and more—is linked to energy. Specifically, I realized the effects on the planet’s climate of our consumption of fossil fuels—oil, coal and natural gas.
With the warming of global temperatures, coral reefs were dying, tropical diseases were migrating, scientists were warning of a sixth “Great Extinction,” severe droughts were occurring in the U.S. southwest, and other parts of the world, and more.
I recalled John Muir’s words, “when you try to pick out anything, you find it’s hitched to everything else in the universe.” Suddenly our whole system of energy seemed “hitched” to everything else.At the 2005 summit, many of us realized that we had a choice: continue “business as usual” (that is, emitting greenhouse gases at ever-increasing rates), or begin to move toward cleaner, more renewable sources of energy: wind, solar, geothermal and bio-fuels, as well as greater efficiencies in our use of energy.
Interestingly, the word “electricity” is from the Greek word elektor, meaning "beaming sun." Given the challenge of transforming the older, polluting energy sources that fuel modern life, energy, in the form of the rays of the sun, no longer seems boring!
Robert Cox is a professor of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He teaches environmental communication and discourse of social movements. He is a former president of the Sierra Club.
